Harry ambles down an aisle to the British Columbia racks, distractedly glancing over the selection. He looks back at Kay. The line at her cashier’s station is long. She has that unguarded look of concentration. He will join her queue, say a quick hello.
Not until he is next in line after the man whose purchases she is ringing up does she see him. Her solemn face brightens. She sets one hand akimbo. “Well! So what’s this? You came to buy wine? Not to see me?”
Harry is relieved and at the same time made shy by her too-public attention. She operates the till again, self-consciously smoothing back her short shiny hair that needs no such fixing. She accepts money from and gives change to her customer, but her eyes are fixed on Harry. Kay places both palms flat on the counter and leans forward. “So why haven’t I heard from you, St. George? What are you buying? I haven’t tried this one. Are you in a hurry? I’m taking my break any minute now. Just wait. Let’s go next door for a coffee.”
She allows him no time to respond; she picks up her station’s intercom phone. Her voice booms powerfully out of two corners of the ceiling. “Cashier to number four, please. Cashier to number four.”
She doesn’t dwell on his absence, offering only that on Christmas Day he was missed. She does say that her daughters were disappointed that they were not to meet the man from the islands whom she had taken canoeing and who had built the fancy trellis over her front gate.
Through the glass pane of the coffee shop, he watches the Stawamus Chief. The top half of that dark granite monolith had for weeks been hooded by a mass of heavy gray clouds. Revealed again, still streaked black along its cracks and crevices, but lightening and blueing where the magnificently sudden sun kissed it, it is an imposing wall. Since this past fall, he has come to think of this side of the big rock as Kay’s country.
All at once there seems to be an abrupt increase in the number of cars jamming the entrance to the mall’s parking lot. Throngs of pedestrians emerge, as if they had been awaiting the sun’s cue. The coffee shop is crammed with customers, and the two cappuccino machines gurgle and spurt at full unceasing throttle. Harry wonders if he and Kay, so different from each other, look to the other customers and passersby like a couple, like lovers. She wears a collar pin of mistletoe that reads HAPPY NEW YEAR, and large shiny silver rings on three fingers of her right hand. If only he had heard from Rose this past holiday week, he thinks, he could relax and enjoy this moment with Kay.
She is saying something.
“Harry St. George, are you listening? I asked, do you have plans for New Year’s Eve?
“Harry! Let’s have dinner New Year’s Eve together,” she insists. “Oh, come on. It’ll be fun. Just dinner. Nothing fancy. I’ll cook.”